Happy Castle Day!

So from this day onwards, I will officially be celebrating Castle Day every 21st of February in order to commemorate the awesomeness of this day (More on how in a minute...) To recap:

Today I went with my friend Leah's (actually said Leia...like the princess) archaeology class on a field trip around County Galway to see some castles. That sounds pretty cool in itself, but I could not have predicted how much fun the day would actually be. At first I was a little skeptical, since we went to a Fortified House, which kind of looked like an English manor house (which is was actually modeled after). Found out it was called Portumna Castle. Afterwards we went to a Towerhouse, which was where things began to get more exciting. It was called Pallas castle, and we got to go all the way to the top and look out over the countryside, which was AMAZING. We had so much fun climbing all over the ruins, and up the stairs and all around the old walls. It is incredible to think that people actually lived in fortresses like that.

Next we went to another towerhouse, but were unable to actually go inside due to an angry bull that was in front of the castle...so we just admired it from afar. Next they gave us lunch, which was at pub and consisted of sandwiches, delicious soup, chips (fries), and coffee. Feeling very refreshed, we continued to Clonmacnoise. The main attraction there is actually the monastery, but we looked at the ruins of an Anglo-Norman Castle that was on the grounds. According to Leah's professor, there is a lot of focus on the Gaelic tradition, and early Celtic history, and so many of the Anglo-Norman things get ignored since they are not really "Irish" (This was evidenced by the fact that we all had to crawl under a fence to get to the castle...there were about 50 of us plus the professors!) Then we wandered around the monastery for awhile. It has several chapels, towers, and a cemetery. It is crazy to see crosses and castles that were built in the 8th century. I don't think we have anything that old where we live!

On the bus ride home, Alecia and I were talking about how cool castle day had been (we got to climb around on stone castles and the weather was fantastic!) and we came up with the idea of building our own castle to celebrate. We mentioned this idea to Leah, and so when we got back to Corrib Village, we built a model castle out of cookies to celebrate Castle Day. We used Nutella as glue, and made a fortified wall, arrow slits, watchtowers, an inner keep, and all the rest of the official castle markers. We decided that this will have to be a Castle Day tradtition, since we had so much fun making it. We are planning on sending some of the pictures to Leah's professor since we were so proud of it! (There are pictures on my Facebook of this glorious event... as well as pictures of all the castles I saw! Also, here is a link to my snapfish account of the same photos...http://www3.snapfish.ie/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=279901344/a=158696412_158696412/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink) Hopefully you can all incorporate Castle Day into your schedules as well...since they are an extremely interesting piece of history!